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Our Linkedin group offers social networking with fellow industry experts and suppliers, and this site provides a portal of blogs and library content that define Cloud Best Practices.

Open Sourcing Best Practices

With this in mind this Nesta project Make It Local is the single most important blueprint to consider. Nesta awarded four councils in Scotland with £25k each to produce an innovative local, open data-based project with the critical stipulation that the resulting code was open sourced.

In short it's the future of Government IT contracting models, whereas this is the past. These monolith contracts are notorious for high failure rates and poor value for money for taxpayers, and with £8 billion+ locked into UK projects of this type it's clear that good money will follow bad, unless the Scottish Government truly embraces an innovative transformation of their own core practices.

Instead the future is 'The Github Difference', harnessing the global Github network of open sourced best practices, ranging from simple web site themes through to full solution 'recipes' such as How we built Gov.uk. With GDS and other countries like the USA gearing up to follow suit the essential point is that it offers greatly reduced IT costs AND the perfect platform for global expansion of the Scottish IT solution providers who are first to seize the opportunity to deliver these blueprints as Cloud-based services to other governments.

Legislate that all government software spending produces open source software, following the lead of pioneers like Bulgaria.